Populism, exclusion and segmentation in contemporary Europe

The Hungarian and Polish experience suggests that populists in power will exclude elites and those not deemed to be part of their conception of ‘the people’. This is a form of differentiation that separates one segment of the population, those the populists associate with ‘the authentic people’ from the rest who experience dominance. The EU has developed into a segmented political order as a consequence of states coming together to form an (in statist terms) incomplete and constrained political order. To what extent does this process allow space for patterns of segmentation within member states? The question matters for establishing the role and salience of populism in Europe. EU segmentation should be understood as integration under quite specific and strict material and normative constraints. Given that this process has other sources than populism and is sustained by other actors and factors, the question is whether populism is merely amplifying already existing constraints that are preventing the EU from taking effective measures to counteract democratic backsliding in member states and entrenching viable democracy at the EU-level. Given that Hungary and Poland are EU member states, an important question is what type of interaction effects the national exclusion and European segmentation processes will have. Thus whereas this paper will argue that the rise of populism across Europe has mutually reinforcing segmenting effects across levels of governance, the EU’s problem is not only populism but the interaction of populism and technocracy and executive dominance.